Crafty? Sell your stuff online

If you can paint, sew, knit, wood carve, make greeting cards, make candles, make jewelry, or any other handicraft, you’ll want to check out Etsy.com. Etsy is an online marketplace for handmade items and it’s a great way to draw attention to your creations without the hassle of setting up your own web store. You also get to take advantage of the website traffic Etsy generates without the headache of internet marketing. What separates Etsy from the Ebay pack is that all items for sale must be made by hand. Best of all it is free to join and the listing fees are reasonable. There are tons of online tools and instructional videos to help you build your virtual storefront.
If you are like me and go out of your way to shop locally, you will love the built-in geolocator. Using this feature you can zoom in on the Grand Bend area and see all of the area crafts for sale. After a quick look you will see that there is still a lot of room for Canadians to join this popular global marketplace.
From Etsy’s online help section we get the lowdown on the cost:
How do Etsy fees work? When you list an item there is a $0.20 (USD) fee per quantity of one. This covers an item listing period of four months. For example, if I list a scarf (and there’s only 1 in stock) it’ll cost 20 cents for 4 months. If you gave the listing a quantity of 3, it would cost 60 cents. When an item sells, there’s a 3.5% fee on the final sale price (not including shipping). All fees are in US dollars. All listings are created equal, with 5 images included in the price.
When a buyer wants to purchase an item they are transferred to PayPal.com to complete the ordering process. As a seller, you will need to setup an account with PayPal. This is an easy process and even a novice can navigate. PayPal has built in currency converters so you can accept payment from any country you are willing to ship to.
Since their launch in June, 2005, over 100,000 sellers from around the world have opened up Etsy shops; it’s definitely worth checking out.